Handouts, etc.
Today we continued our discussion of morphology. We didn’t get to questions 3 & 4 on today’s DQs, but we’ll pick up with those on Wednesday.
A question that came up in several forms today was about identifying morphemes in English words when the current analysis is at odds with etymology (i.e., the history of the word). In some cases it looks like a single morpheme has a history that suggests it was once morphologically complex, and in other cases it looks like a complex word is no longer transparently related to its parts. Some borderline examples we discussed were scissors, comfortable, and amoral/moralizes.
For scissors the question is whether there is a morpheme scissor; the existence of words like scissor-kick suggest there might be, but it’s not clear what scissor means in isolation. For comfortable, it could clearly break down into comfort and able, but then we are left with the puzzle of its meaning, which isn’t exactly what you’d expect given the meaning of its parts. And finally, amoral and moralizes both have the word moral as their root, but moral seems to be related to the idea of mores (as in social mores), so we wondered whether there is a root mor in English and what it would mean.
I think it’s true that most people would treat moral as a simplex word. The scoop seems to be that moral is derived from Latin via French (OED link), and the related mores was borrowed much later (OED link) with some attestations of now-obsolete mours before that (OED link). We can’t rule out the possibility that some English speakers have analyzed moral and mores as sharing a root, even though it never appears in isolation, though the histories of the words suggest multiple borrowings.
As for scissors, it seems to have had a somewhat long and confusing history. The link to its entry in the Oxford English Dictionary is here.
[Thanks to Nick for some sleuthing, which turned up these websites with etymological info: moral & scissors!]